The Hidden Treasure and the Pearl of Great Price (25 of 26)

Two very short parables making one point, with one awkward detail that most treatments quietly step over.

A man finds treasure in someone else’s field, hides it again, and buys the field without mentioning what is in it. That is the story Jesus tells, and it is worth facing rather than smoothing.

What Is the Point of the Pair?

That the kingdom is worth everything you have, and that the transaction is not a sacrifice in the sense people usually mean.

Both men sell all they possess. Both do it gladly. Neither is portrayed as making a painful renunciation, which is the tell.^[1]

The parables are calls to discipleship built around a valuation. Obtaining the kingdom warrants giving up whatever is required, because of what is being acquired rather than because giving things up is meritorious.

The similarity between the two stories makes the shared lesson unmistakable. The kingdom possesses a value that does not compare to anything else on the table.

How Do the Two Differ?

One man was not looking and one man was.

The treasure is stumbled on. Nothing suggests the finder was searching for anything; he was in a field and he found something.

The merchant was searching. He is in the business of fine pearls, he knows what he is looking at, and when he sees the one he has been after he liquidates.

Amy-Jill Levine would stop me there. Matthew does not say “a merchant”; he says “a man, a merchant”, and she takes the doubled phrase seriously. The man is a person first and a merchant second, and the second description may not last. He was looking for fine pearls, plural, and he gives up the search not when he has enough of them but when he finds one. A pearl dealer who sells his stock, his house and everything else for a single pearl has nothing left to trade with. In her words, by finding that pearl of ultimate worth the merchant stops being a merchant. So it is not quite right to say he found exactly what he was looking for. He found something that ended the looking.

Together they cover both ways people arrive. Some are looking and some are ambushed, and the response in both cases is identical.

Is the Man in the Field Being Dishonest?

That question deserves a straight answer, and the straight answer is that it is uncomfortable.

He finds treasure on land he does not own. He hides it again. Then he buys the field from an owner who does not know what is in it.

One commentator describes him as something of a trickster, and notes plainly that it is not entirely honest to find a treasure on a piece of land, hide it, and then buy the land to get the treasure.

In the first version of this post I said I could not find a clear statement of the Jewish law on treasure found in another man’s field. Snodgrass has since supplied the texts, and it turns out the reason I could not find a statement that settles it is that there is not one. The rabbis discussed found property at length. The Jerusalem Talmud tells of Simeon ben Shetah’s disciples buying him a donkey from a Gentile and finding a pearl hanging on it; he asks whether the seller knew, and when they say no he tells them to go and return it. The Babylonian Talmud rules that stacked coins must be proclaimed while scattered ones belong to the finder, and that a covered vessel found in a dungheap must not be touched. There is a story in Leviticus Rabbah of Alexander watching two men in a foreign court each refuse a treasure found in a carob-tree one had sold the other, and confessing that in his own kingdom both men would have lost their heads and the king would have kept the treasure. Horace has a labourer who found a hoard and bought the very ground he used to work for hire. And the Mekilta tells, with approval, of a man who sold an inherited house for a trifle and watched the buyer dig up silver and gold in it, which is how the rabbis pictured Egypt letting Israel go.

None of that answers the case in the parable. Snodgrass’s verdict is that the rabbinic discussions are helpful but not specific enough to answer the questions about Jesus’ story, and that Roman law was apparently undecided about found treasure. His own lean is that the hearers would have thought the purchase legitimate: the treasure had no connection to the owner, may have been in the ground for centuries, and buying the field is exactly what established a legal claim to it, since taking it without buying would have invited one. He adds a rule I find hard to argue with, that any attempt to interpret a parable by what is not in it is almost certainly wrong, and that the pearl story, which nobody thinks is about dishonesty, is told as the twin of this one.

So the position I held in the first version survives, with better company. The ethical question is real, the parable does not address it, and anyone claiming the transaction was plainly clean or plainly crooked should be asked for their source. The sources exist now and they do not decide it.

What can be said is that this is not the only parable with a morally awkward protagonist. The unjust steward is worse. Jesus repeatedly tells stories in which the behaviour of a character illustrates a point without being commended, and reading the finder’s tactics as a model is the same error as reading the steward’s fraud as one.

Is the Buyer Jesus or the Disciple?

The disciple, and the christological reading has largely been abandoned.

I had Irenaeus down as an early holder of that reading in the first version, and that was wrong. I went back to Against Heresies 4.26.1 and he does something different. For Irenaeus Christ is not the buyer; Christ is the treasure. He is the treasure hidden in the field, “that is, in this world”, borrowing the line that the field is the world from the explanation of the weeds in Matt 13:38, and he is the treasure hidden in the Scriptures, pointed out there by types and parables and not visible until he came. That is an allegory, but it is not the one this section is rejecting. The reading in which Christ is the one who finds the treasure and sells everything to purchase his people, is a different allegory, and it resurfaces periodically.

Modern scholarship has moved decisively away from both. The argument against is not merely that it is old-fashioned. It is that everything known about how Jesus taught cuts against him telling a story in which he appears as the treasure stumbled upon or the pearl diligently sought, or as the man doing the buying.

Some commentators reach for the christological reading precisely because they are embarrassed by the language of purchase, which is a poor reason to adopt an interpretation. Snodgrass says the same thing more bluntly: the approach is unnecessarily motivated by the desire to avoid any thought of salvation by works, and neither the man, the finding nor the field should receive a specific identification. The imagery is being pressed further than it will go.^[2]

The buyer is the disciple. The cost is real and the valuation is what makes it obvious rather than painful.

Where Do They Sit in Matthew 13?

At the end, as the climax of a chapter built in pairs, and told to a smaller audience than the ones before it.

Matt 13 runs in couples. The sower and the weeds. The mustard seed and the leaven. The treasure and the pearl.

The audience changes partway through, and it is easy to miss. At Matt 13:36 Jesus leaves the crowds and goes into the house, and his disciples come to him there. Everything after that verse is said indoors, to the twelve. The treasure and the pearl are in that second half.

That is how the ESV reads the chapter, and it is how I read it. Snodgrass is less sure. The only reason we know the weeds, the mustard seed and the leaven were told to the crowds is that Matthew says so after the fact, and he never says anything of the kind about the treasure and the pearl. Nothing in either parable makes it suitable only for disciples. His guess is that Jesus told them more than once, to more than one audience. The staging in Matthew still puts them in the house, but it is a staging, and I would not build more on it than that.

So the escalating demand across the chapter is not aimed at a crowd that was enjoying the miracles and beginning to drift. The parables about receptivity were public. The parable about price was not. By the time the cost is named, the room has emptied of everyone except the people who had already followed him inside.

The first pair is about receptivity. The second is about scale and hiddenness. The third is about price, and it comes last, in private, for a reason.

Part of a series working through the parables. See also the parable of the sower and the mustard seed and the yeast, which open the same chapter.

Footnotes2

1. That both men sell gladly is the detail that separates these parables from a call to asceticism. Neither is described as sacrificing. Both are described as making an obvious trade, which is a claim about the valuation rather than about the virtue of giving things up.
2. The christological reading has a long pedigree and it is worth knowing why it was dropped rather than simply that it was. The objection is about method: Jesus does not otherwise cast himself as an object within his own parables, and a reading that requires him to do so here needs more support than discomfort with the word purchase.

Sources

Craig L. Blomberg, Neither Poverty nor Riches: A Biblical Theology of Material Possessions, New Studies in Biblical Theology (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1999), 7:115-116. Supports the core point about the kingdom warranting the sacrifice of everything, the rejection of the christological reading as pressing the imagery too far, and the placement of the pair within the escalating demands of Matt 13.

Brad H. Young, The Parables: Jewish Tradition and Christian Interpretation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012), 200-201. Supports the account of the shift away from allegorical readings and the argument that a christological interpretation is implausible given what is known of Jesus's teaching method. In print, and in Logos.

Wendy Farley, "Theological Perspective on Matt 13:44-46," in Feasting on the Gospels: Matthew (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2013), 394. Supports the observation that the finder acts as something of a trickster.

Klyne R. Snodgrass, Stories with Intent: A Comprehensive Guide to the Parables of Jesus, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018), "The Treasure" and "The Pearl". Supplies the primary texts on found treasure quoted in the honesty section (y. Baba Meṣiʿa 2.5, 8; b. Baba Meṣiʿa 25a-b; Leviticus Rabbah 27.1; Horace, Satires 2.6.10; Mekilta Beshallaḥ 2.149-55) and the judgment that they are not specific enough to answer the questions about Jesus's parable, with Roman law apparently undecided; his lean that the hearers would have considered the purchase legitimate and that buying the field established a claim to the treasure; the rule that interpreting a parable by what is not in it is almost certainly wrong; the observation that the Christ-as-buyer reading is motivated by a wish to avoid salvation by works; and the caution that Matthew never says the treasure and the pearl were told to the disciples rather than the crowd. In print, and in Logos.

Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi (New York: HarperOne, 2014), chapter on the Pearl of Great Price. Supports the reading of "a man, a merchant" in Matt 13:45 as an unstable identity, the point that he was seeking pearls in the plural and stops at one, and her line that by finding the pearl of ultimate worth the merchant stops being a merchant. In print, and in Logos.

Irenaeus, Against Heresies 4.26.1, in ANF vol. 1 (1885). The passage where Christ is the treasure hidden in the field, that is, in the world, and the treasure hidden in the Scriptures, pointed out by types and parables. Supports the correction of the first version's claim that Irenaeus made Christ the purchaser. Free in full at ccel.org.

Jerusalem Talmud Baba Meṣiʿa 2.5, 8; Babylonian Talmud Baba Meṣiʿa 25a-b; Leviticus Rabbah 27.1; Mekilta Beshallaḥ 2.149-55; Horace, Satires 2.6.10. All quoted from Snodgrass's collection of primary parallels; I have not gone to the originals for this post.

ESV Study Bible (Wheaton: Crossway, 2008), notes on Matt 13:36 and Matt 13:36-53. The change of setting and audience partway through the chapter, which puts the treasure and the pearl indoors with the disciples rather than in front of the crowd; Snodgrass's caution on this is noted in the post. In print, and in Logos.

The biblical texts cited: Matt 13:44-46, Matt 13:36 and Matt 13:38.

Where the sourcing stops: the first version of this post said I could not find a clear statement of the Jewish law governing treasure found in another person's field. Snodgrass has since supplied the rabbinic and Roman texts, and I have quoted them through him rather than from the originals; his conclusion, which I share, is that they do not settle the case in the parable. The post still declines to call the transaction lawful or unlawful. The first version also named Irenaeus as an early holder of the Christ-as-buyer reading; his actual passage makes Christ the treasure, and the post now says so. The parables themselves do not raise the ethical question.